Donald Trump: ‘Republican leaders found themselves trailing in the wake of a reality-show TV star who stripped the veneer off their dog-whistle rhetoric and openly called Mexicans rapists and criminals.’
Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

In January, the Republican party will take control of the US government for the first time since 2005. The switch from being the party of opposition to being the governing party is never easy and the deep divisions in today’s Republican party make today’s transition unusually chaotic.

The election added to the chaos. As president-elect, Trump’s evident dismay and lack of preparation for taking office suggested that he had little interest in doing the job for which he had campaigned so viciously. What’s more, Trump lost the popular vote by a significant margin and Democrats also got more votes for both houses of Congress. This lack of popular support puts even more pressure on Republicans to craft policies that a majority of Americans can accept.

Therein lies the Republicans’ problem. Today’s party is led not by practical politicians but by ideologues. This was not always the case. Traditionally, Republicans embraced the idea that Americans naturally enjoyed social and economic harmony. It was the job of congressmen and women to develop that harmony by figuring out how to use the government to promote equality of opportunity for those just starting their climb up the economic ladder. Those individuals were the engine room of production. They would produce more than they could consume, so they would, in turn, support a thriving middle class.

When he was elected president in 1952, the first Republican to be elected to the job since 1928, Dwight Eisenhower accepted the reality that unregulated capitalism and the lack of a social safety net in a newly industrialised country precipitated economic and social crisis. Although it sprang from traditional Republicanism rather than the tenets of the Democrats, Eisenhower’s “middle way” looked much like the Democrats’ New Deal.

This new “liberal consensus” between Democrats and Republicans maintained that the government had a role in promoting economic fairness and social stability. But it sparked a backlash, one we can still see playing itself out today. A few wealthy businessmen insisted that government regulation infringed their liberty by affecting the way they did business. Taxes to fund social welfare also hampered their freedom.

They stood firm on the concept of individual liberty, which was, they argued, as firm as a principle as those of the Ten Commandments. These “movement conservatives” saw an epic battle between themselves and “liberals”, whose embrace of government activism was permitting communism to snake its way into America.

But movement conservatives had a practical problem. Most Americans liked government regulation of business and social welfare. To advance their cause, movement conservatives turned to racism. When the US supreme court handed down the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision requiring desegregation in schools, leading movement publication National Review pushed the idea that an active government used white tax dollars to benefit black Americans. Suddenly, the arguments of movement conservatives began to get traction. In 1964, they got their chance to restore America to “purity”. Republican candidate Barry Goldwater’s supporters called for an end to civil rights legislation. A new voice in the movement added conspiracy theory and populism to what had been an elite conversation. Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, accused the eastern financiers and banking interests who made up the eastern establishment of backing the liberal consensus because they made money from a murky world of international co-operation.

She backed Goldwater as he offered a clear vision of a nation that stood against communism. Enough with eggheads who called for nuanced responses to complicated problems in the world. What should Americans do about communism? Stop it!

Goldwater’s presidential run turned into a rout, but the electoral map offered a blueprint for future Republican candidates. Goldwater carried his home state of Arizona, and five other states, all of them in the deep South. Race became a staple in movement conservatives’ lexicon.

Later, Richard Nixon added sexism and a distrust of organised labour to the racism that had clinched his election. He told supporters that “some people” wanted to live by government handouts rather than by working and that these lowlifes were sucking hardworking Americans dry through tax dollars. In 1980, Ronald Reagan implanted this bifurcated world view into the White House.

The election of Democrat Bill Clinton horrified them. He was a popular statist who threatened to undo all the work they had done to destroy government programmes. They set out to destroy his administration. In 1994, when movement conservatives under Newt Gingrich captured the House for the first time since the Eisenhower administration, they set out to “begin an emergency dismantling of the welfare system, which is shredding the social fabric”, bankrupting the country and “gutting the work ethic, educational performance and moral discipline of the poor”. They set out to defund the government entirely, in the hope that debt would end expenditures.

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By 2000, movement conservatives laid siege to remaining traditional Republicans in the party, purging it of those they called “RINOs” – Republicans in Name Only. They turned to Texas governor George W Bush as their presidential nominee and when he squeaked into office after losing the popular vote, declared he had a mandate. Bush slashed taxes and regulations and brought evangelicals directly into White House deliberations.

Barack Obama’s election represented everything Republicans opposed. He was a black man who promised to use the government to help women and people of colour. “Taxed enough already,” screamed protesters who called themselves “Tea Partiers”. When Obama’s foreign policy signalled a return to a multilateralism that recognised the end of America’s post-Second World War dominance, movement conservatives howled. In 2010, Republicans built on the Tea Party anger with the money of wealthy businessmen to take control of swing state legislatures.

In 2016, however, the winking of Republican leaders at the racism and sexism of Obama bashers backfired. They found themselves trailing in the wake of a reality-show TV star who stripped the veneer off their dog-whistle rhetoric and openly called Mexicans rapists and criminals and talked about women in the crudest terms. Trump was not one of them – he was not even a politician. Trump is a salesman, pitching to a population primed by a generation of movement conservative politicians to see themselves as embattled, assailed by the demands of minorities and women for special treatment enforced by the government.

But this leaves the Republicans in a quandary. Pure movement conservatives who back economic libertarianism, such as speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, were horrified by Trump’s naked racism and sexism. And, assuming he would lose the election, they vowed to run without him. But their vision, which demands, among other things, the destruction of enormously popular programmes such as Medicare and social security, has historically found few backers in the general population.

Evangelicals, brought on board by the Republican coalition in the 1980s with promises of ending abortion rights and cultural change, backed Trump. But they, too, have changed in the past generation. Finding new political and cultural power, the religious wing of the Republican party gained momentum. Its adherents took advantage of new religious liberty laws to keep their children out of state schools and to demand that civic society bow to religious imperatives.

By the 1990s, religious leaders were no longer simply defending family values in a secular society. They were insisting that US democracy was originally based in Christian laws and demanding that the nation be restored to its Christian heritage. This “Dominionism” inspired political leaders such as Mike Huckabee, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz. And then there is Trump, a huckster closing a sale with whatever promises his supporters want. Fed on decades of movement conservative warnings that people of colour and women are gaming the system to take tax dollars from hardworking white men, his supporters have made it clear that what they want is a nation dominated by white men.

Can these factions reconcile? At first, it seemed as if the weight of the new administration would fall on Ryan. President-elect Trump presented a list of things he promised in his first hundred days, including a large infrastructure package and an end to lobbying, as well as the tax cuts so popular with movement conservatives. Ryan and Senate Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell, nodded quickly to tax cuts and ending Medicare, but refused even to consider infrastructure or lobbying.

This bifurcation of the world is one that could marry evangelicals to Trump’s alt-right supporters. Evangelicals have long supported the idea of a militant Christianity. Even in the absence of congressional support for infrastructure projects, such a worldview might also attract America’s economically and culturally dispossessed white men. A resurrection of the traditional Christian west would promise to relegate minorities and women to subordinate positions.

That vision of a world divided in two echoes 40s and 50s anti-communism and promises to return the US to preeminence, erasing multilateralism and the cultural importance of women and minorities. It is a world in which America is, uppermost, ruled by white men. It is also a world that has gone beyond recall, except in the fantasies of those whom the world has left behind.

Phyllis Schlafly, who as president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, accused financiers of backing the liberal consensus because they made money from a murky world of international co-operation. Photograph: Rebecca Cook / Reuters/Reuters